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Hillary Clinton’s Radical Promise

Hillary Clinton can’t make the kind of sweeping promises that voters want to hear.

That’s the criticism she’s faced repeatedly during her run for the White House. She focuses on details, not expansive themes. In the primaries, Bernie Sanders campaigned on free college and health care for all, while Mrs. Clinton offered up complex tax incentives. Donald J. Trump is also all too happy to promise the moon, or huge walls and manufacturing booms, with scant details.

But Mrs. Clinton has made one promise over and over again throughout her campaign that is sweeping, idealistic and impossible to meet with detailed tax packages or government subsidies alone.

She vows to close the wage gap for women.

Talking about the gender wage gap is not foreign to Democratic candidates. For Mrs. Clinton, though, it’s been a consistent rallying cry. “It’s time to have wage equality once and for all,” she said in February 2015. “It will be great for the American economy when we finally close that gap,” she told a crowd in October.

And she followed that up on April 12, Equal Pay Day, the day that symbolically marks when the average woman has worked long enough to catch up to what the average man made the year before. After going over the numbers — women, on average, make 79 percent of what men make when they all work full time, year-round, and minority women make even less — Mrs. Clinton said it was a myth that the gap couldn’t be closed. “We can if we summon the political will,” she said, promising to “use every tool.”

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Hillary Clinton with supporters in Council Bluffs, Iowa.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

She also knows full well just how many tools she would have to use to make good on that promise. The causes of the wage gap aren’t simple; they are myriad and interlocking. One is experience. Women are much more likely than men to leave the work force or reduce their hours, often to care for family members, especially beginning in their early 30s, and that’s when the gender wage gap starts to swell. They disrupt their careers and miss out on raises and promotions.

The problem stems from the lack of support in the United States for a parent who’s trying to balance work and child rearing, a job that still mostly falls to women. We don’t guarantee paid family leave, a benefit just 13 percent of private sector employees get, and child care costs remain high. But when women have paid leave and access to steady, reasonably priced child care, their wages benefit. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka stood on the convention stage in Cleveland last week and pointed this out, although given that his campaign has paid men more than women it’s unclear whether Mr. Trump will follow through on his daughter’s pledge that he will focus on equal pay.

Men and women also end up in different industries and occupations, and the ones dominated by men pay more. Women still make less in every industry and nearly every job, of course, including the fields where men make up the bulk of the work force. And when women move into a previously male-dominated area, the pay drops. Still, pushing women into the areas that pay better while also trying to raise the pay of the jobs that women already hold is one way to start closing the gap.

Other elements Mrs. Clinton has to take into consideration: Women in unionized workplaces have smaller differences in pay, but unionization rates have been on a steady decline for some time. Women also make up roughly two-thirds of all minimum-wage workers, so their pay would benefit from an increase.

All of these factors combine to create a wage gap that women can’t escape at the bottom or the top of the pay scales.

Mrs. Clinton doesn’t shy away from the complexity of the wage gap when she offers up her ideas for how to solve it. In April, she didn’t simply stop at calling for the passage of legislation Democrats have long tried to get through Congress, which includes a Paycheck Fairness Act that would prohibit employers from muzzling workers’ discussions of wages and crack down on companies that pay women less.

She branched out further. She called for the federal government to demand information about pay scales from private companies and make employers analyze their data by gender. She suggested getting more women into high-paid fields like technology and science. She proposed a higher minimum wage. And she even went beyond policies directly tied to pay, calling for paid family leave and affordable child care. In other arenas, she’s talked about raising women’s pay by increasing compensation for the country’s teachers and child care providers.

A lot of these items are a tough sell in Congress. Republicans have blocked the paycheck fairness bill multiple times. They haven’t budged on the minimum wage since 2009. And forget about any appetite for new programs like family leave or universal preschool, which the Republican Party is now calling government intrusion into the family. None of that has stopped Mrs. Clinton from talking about ending the wage gap.

So why is her promise to close that gap, a promise so utopian and so broad, one that would significantly affect half of the country’s population, being ignored by her critics? Perhaps it might have something to do with the gender of that half. The wage gap is rarely seen as a pressing economic problem, but rather as a “women’s issue,” the interest of a special-interest group.

But if the wage gap is instead thought of as a disease infecting all corners of our economy, then calling for its cure is no small act. What to many sounds like empty campaign rhetoric is, in fact, radical.

Bryce Covert is the economic policy editor at ThinkProgress and a contributor to The Nation.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 27, 2016, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Hillary Clinton’s Radical Promise. Today's Paper|Subscribe